~ We put the 'P' in the Internet

Category Archives: RootAdmin

I needed the ability to generate a menu dynamically in Fluxbox for various things that change on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a facility built into fluxbox to allow for this. So I spent some time and built a partially dynamic menu that updates with the click of an ‘update’ menu item at the root menu.

I was trying to come up with a good way for the menu to update on the fly. Since fluxbox simply reads a menu file (when you use the [include] function) I needed a file that when read, it returns a dynamic response and begins the process again. It’s not completely in time, but it at least refreshes on the fly. So what is a file that provides these properties?

I had someone question me as to why the router appears to be misreporting its CPU utilization… So as I haven’t written anything around this topic, I figured I would make a note for any future engineers struggling to understand what is going on in their routers.

I decided to collapse the multiple systems I have running various flavours of Linux and BSD into a single system. For a long time I had been using Windows Small Business Server. Well I don’t really want to spend the money to upgrade to 2016 and since it appears Microsoft has abandoned its purist Unix roots by trading the tight and tidy SFU (Interix) for the wildly fat Ubuntu and a Linux ABI. In the advent of this change, I figured I would flip back to FreeBSD, which in my not-so-humble opinion is still the closest thing to Unix you can get. In fact, it actually derives its original sources from none other than Research UNIX, and while it’s wildly more advanced, the distribution holds it’s origin close to it’s heart.

Either way, the task: Support the ever growing number of ‘Appliance’ installs on top of FreeBSD. In this first iteration I have found several guides and worked through getting Debian 7 functional in a FreeBSD 10-STABLE Jail. No guarantees on stability, but I’ll update this if I come across any oddities. This task was performed on FreeBSD 10.3.

4-byte (32-bit) BGP Neighbor Information with AsDotNotation

A problem currently exists within Solarwinds where 4-byte (32-bit) ASNs overflow into a negative number when utilizing a portion of the private scoped ASN space specifically, the ranges 2,147,483,648 (32768.0) through 4,294,967,296 (65535.65535) overflow into -2,147,483,648 through -1 respectively.

To show the correct data, we created a custom table utilizing the following WSQL to generate the correct information. See past the snippet for an explanation as to how and why this works.

So we have been working diligently to resolve an issue in relation to a vendor deployed Cisco Telepresence Show and Share setup. We ended up with through the troubleshooting process with two requirements. Basically what we were seeing was if the access port attached to the receiver was configured or negotiated at 100Mbps as opposed to Gigabit that the video stream would not play with any measure of predictability.

When everyone would go home or be out for lunch, the stream would play okay, but when the switch became even slightly busy, the video would most of the time not even provide a single key-frame and hence no video. Keep in mind that this was a 768kbps stream, so it was insane to think this could actually be the switch causing the issue.

With Auto-QoS defaults, we were dropping around 500 packets in 10 seconds. We actually forced this work by modifying marking the multicast traffic generated at the server on the server’s access switch and by modifying the output buffers for QoS on the client attached 2960S Access Switch. This required giving 70% of the buffer to the priority Queue, making sure CS5 marked traffic was getting inserted into the Priority Queue, and setting the thresholds for the priority queue to allow oversubsciption at 3200%.

Steve asked on my previous posting in regards to DNS Lookup in Excel if forward lookup could be done. (Find the IP Address from the Hostname). Believe it or not I one up your request. How about DNS Forward and Reverse lookup as well as Ping!

Press Alt-F11 in Excel to get to the VBA screen.

Right click on the Project View

Click Add Module

Add the following snippet.

Use: GetHostname("4.2.2.1") in any Excel cell.
or
Use: GetIpAddress("www.google.com") in any Excel cell.or
Use: Ping("4.2.2.1") in any Excel cell.

We are currently working on a project to implement a security design around our Industrial Automation Networks in the Field. These range from gas measurement shacks with a single valve all the way up to multi-train gas processing plants. Post the StuxNet incident and the 60 minutes airing that notified the nation of the great dangers in exposing our vital infrastructure to the internet, there have been several regulatory commssions who have or are currently working on updating thier requirements around securing this vital infrastructure. Our goal is to beat them to the punch and be prepared for the worst while doing our Control Technicians a favor or two in providing them further isolation from the Enterprise.

In 2002 FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) kicked off a lot of these regulations by requiring each government entity to develop requirements to protect their perspective systems from cyber attack. Due to this, government agencies have become more and more aware of the threats imposed by networked system access to critical systems. In my opinion, this eyeopening will spark the proposal of additional regulation to protect these critical systems. In this first article, I’ll cover some common terms and we’ll note some regulatory bodies and any specific regulations already identified… Continue reading →

A common sense explanation and realist approach to Search Engine Optimization

I was reading through some articles on my father in law’s company blog /ebscospring/ in relation to ISO certifications. I started to leave a comment that eventually turned into an article, in reference to a post requested at the behest of the individual managing SEO for them. Even though SEO is not necissarily relevant to networking, it has come up quite a bit lately. Hopefully, my experience can provide some light in a rather conveluded maze of tactic.

SEO is a tough game. Most people get wind of the concepts and they build the following punch list in their heads:

Step 1. Build a website.

Step 2. ?

Step 3. $$$

Most people even realize you need people to look at it, and you need Top Search Order to make it easily accessible to your perspective audience. About this point is where we make big mistakes or just waste our own time.Continue reading →